Abstract

Product service systems (PSS) provide an opportunity to create innovative interactions between consumers, the products and services they use and the providers offering these products. In contrast to traditional services related to products, the service component of a PSS significantly adds value to the experience of the consumer. Within the context of this paper, we add ‘smart’ to the PSS, because advances in information and communication technology have made it possible to combine products and services in innovative ways. Although PSS introduces new elements to a design process that require a thorough rethinking of how designers should relate to this specific kind of products, the main challenge is to manage the variety of underlying design processes. Especially in relation to the front end of innovation, there is a need for new and adapted tools in order to explore emerging PSS opportunities. In this paper, we report on a ten weeklong project. This project was targeted at first master students in product development, as a case to explore how existing service design tools - modified with a specific PSS focus - can be introduced in the early stages of PSS concept creation and definition. We use the creativity support index (CSI) as a metric to evaluate the tools used. The paper brings forward several lessons learned related to the implementation of the adjusted tools for a PSS design project.

E&PDE 2014 16th International conference on Engineering and Product Design

The 16th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education will be hosted by the Faculty of Engineering Technology of the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands. The conference is organised in partnership with the Design Education Special Interest Group (DESIG) of the Design Society, and the Institution of Engineering Designers (IED). The conference brings together representatives from education, design practice, industry and government agencies that have an interest...